Apps

Facebook Apps

We love creating fun social apps that go viral. We are known as the social app experts and are proud of delivering over 200+ Facebook apps for some of the worlds biggest brands! Check out some of our portfolio below...

What we do

Facebook presence is an essential part of many businesses, and Facebook can be a notoriously tricky platform to develop for due to the fact it is continuously evolving. There is a lot of outdated documentation out there, and some advice can lead even seasoned developers astray. We work with the Facebook platform all day every day. Our in house development tools ensure all projects are delivered swiftly and to the highest standard and our experience allows us to bring ideas to market quicker than anyone else.

We are the experts in social media development and have partnered with countless creative agencies and brands to deliver successful campaigns on a global scale.

Our involvement can start as early as concept phase to ensure everything is technically viable as well as provide insight into unlocking new features of the platform. We often assist with technical wireframes to help designers plan and ensure development can begin early.

Official England Cricket

XII Twelth Man Cricketing Moment of the Year, cast your vote now. Users can choose from five cricket moments and vote for their favourite for a chance to win a signed picture of the moment.

Cricket official video voting app of the year!

Overview

England Cricket has put it to the fans to vote on the best moments in cricket by asking Facebook fans to vote for their favourite clip.

Working with Brands2Life we developed an easy voting mechanism that allowed users to vote once on their favourite moment in cricket. To increase the fan base we had a like gate in place and working to a tight deadline we streamed videos directly from YouTube which allowed us time to focus on the app and turn this project around in one week.

The BOXLIGHT team is renowned for quick turnarounds and successfully delivered this app with time to spare! Competitions are a big part of Facebook promotions and we're happy to say from small campaigns to large tv-spot competitions, we've done it all.

Phones 4U Upgrade

With over 600+ stores across the UK, Phones 4U is happy to be one of the largest independent mobile phone retailers. Their comical take on upgrades have won them many TV commercial awards in the past few years.

Getting great work done in a way that you understand.

Overview

#ProjectUpgrade was a campaign created by Adam&Eve DDB with a huge media push asking customers to challenge them with any upgrade. This viral campaign had TV spots and billboard adverts encouraging people to use Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to enter the challenge.

This campaign lived as a Facebook app with a mobile accessible version for users to submit their upgrade requests. We had fun integrating Twitter API #hashtags, the Instagram API, Google Maps API and of course, Facebook. The entire social upgrade hub is controlled, moderated and updated via our bespoke secure admin backend system which imports requests from all the above social avenues.

Upgrades given out by Phones 4U can be plotted on a map by dropping a pin in the backend and uploading video or imagery to share the experience with fans.

VOLKSWAGEN UK

BOXLIGHT supported Tribal DDB in implementing the campaign on Facebook, while MediaCom was the media planner. The campaign, devised by DDB, saw those who pay the car a compliment, receive a personalised compliment back from the brand across 18 nationwide digital outdoor poster sites.

The Drum - "Volkswagen returns the compliment with outdoor and social media campaign for Up!" - Read more here

Great social media campaignwith excellent results.

Overview

This campaign involved users sharing a compliment about the new up! to their friends, and in return VW would "Big them up" back. It involved us taking user submissions, and generating compliments for users based on their Facebook information. These were then synced to digital display boards across the country at a specific time and users were notified of when they could see themselves on the big screen. This campaign generated massive interest and was part of a Facebook homepage takeover!

The logistical challenges involved in this campaign made it one of the more exciting campaigns we have developed on Facebook. It required us to integrate with a live webcam in Westfield London and record VW's messages to users which we had synced to the video advertising boards. Then making use of ffmpeg we had to slice videos of individual users and upload it to their wall to complete the "Big Up".

Warburtons Toast Cards

Warburtons is a family-owned British baking company that has had a strong following in the UK for over a century. BETC London were appointed as their creative agency to come up with some fresh social ideas.

Getting great work done in a way that you understand.

Overview

Working closely with BETC we developed a flash game that invited customers to like their Facebook page and create their Picasso on a piece of toast! Yes, that's right! Users could use a knife to sketch on toast, add jam or any other crazy ideas they had and submit a toast card to the gallery.

This campaign was very well received with thousands of submissions and some pretty impressive artwork made digitally on toast. That must be a first right?

Bertrum the Cat

Bertrum the cat was created by Wieden+Kennedy for the Cravendale brand in order to maintain dominance in the filtered milk category. It was a fun social Facebook campaign that lived on Bertrum the cat's Facebook page and encouraged fans to register their cat to his army.

CampaignLive - "Cravendale is pitting cats with thumbs against milkmen in its latest campaign by Wieden+Kennedy, running across TV and Facebook." - Read more here

Getting great work done in a way that you understand.

Overview

Our developers built all aspects of this fun Facebook application that allowed Bertrum fans to take a picture of their cat and add some awesome props to their photo. Fans could upload an image from their desktop, Facebook gallery or use their webcam. Once uploaded they could resize their image in a frame and start adding props to the their new recruit for Bertrum's army. Once all the props have been positioned and resized the final image was entered into Cravendale's Cat army and could then be shared onto user's walls or saved to desktop.

This app was so successful that the fan base jumped by thousands and a re-skin was in order for a Christmas promotion of the now famous Bertrum army.

Halifax Big Lunch

The Big Lunch is a very simple idea from the Eden Project. The aim is to get as many people as possible across the whole of the UK to have lunch with their neighbours once a year in a simple act of community, friendship and fun.

"We've been inundated with requests! If you have already requested a Halifax Big Lunch kit you will be notified by email if you were one of the lucky 7000."

Getting great work done in a way that you understand.

Overview

We were once again approached by Adam&Eve DDB to execute the build of this project as we have worked on many Halifax projects in the past.

Working with banking clients means security is always at the forefront of development practice, no matter what the campaign. Customers feel that if you can't keep simple competition data safe, how can you keep their money safe? When we work with any data-sensitive campaigns our attention to security is essential and with any of our competitions our clients can rest assured that data is safely transferred, stored and backed up. Our use of best practice, a secure framework, SSL only and encrypted data distribution ensured this campaign was no different.

The Big Lunch was a very successful campaign and we continue the history we have of developing apps for Halifax.

Why devops?

Server administration has made some huge advances over recent years bridging the gap between server administration and development. With the popularisation of containers and of course cloud technologies, it has become ever important to create reproducible server architectures. The advantages range from easing development and disaster recovery, and help to remove the reliance on individuals within teams who harbour the knowledge of how infrastrucutre is architected in their heads our out-of-date documentation.

BOXLIGHT bring 14 years of server administration experience to the devops world, specialising in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace Cloud we utilise your preferred tool such as Puppet or Ansible to architect robust and reliable infrastructures for any project.

Benefits of devops:

- Easily recreate server environments

- Utilise autoscaling with confidence

- Reduce dependancy on individuals

- Seamless server updates

- Manage from 1 to 1000's of servers

Socialreach

We operate the website Socialreach which provides social media translation services to business via an easy-to-use platform. Currently the platform supports Facebook, Twitter & Weibo and can provide human translation in over 80 languages.

Socialreach

Social media translation.

Technologies

The creative idea and concept were envisioned and designed by the BOXLIGHT founders.

Technologies used are Silex, MongoDB, ReactJS, Node.js.

Dunlop 125 years

The global tyre brand Dunlop has been manufacturing rubber tyres since 1888 and what better way to celebrate their 125 years anniversary than to create a unique experience for their customers with the chance to win a personalised trip in a luxury vehicle of their choice.

Solid Delivery email

marketing tool for bespoke sends.

Technologies

The creative idea and concept were envisioned and designed by The Marketing Store Worldwide and in partnership with BOXLIGHT we created a user experience that not only allowed them to experience the beautiful scenery of the trip beforehand by using the Google Maps API but also allowing them to customise which vehicle they wanted to ride in.

Our team of developers had to overcome a few hurdles with how the Google Maps API functioned and some very in depth customisation was needed to ensure the experience was fluid and allowed the user to skip ahead to Landmark stops marked with map pins. Speed was very important and image pre-loading was essential to keep the ride smooth.

Bloombla

Social Network: Connecting like minded people through things they've done in their lives. Keep a list of things you've done and share them with your friends or family. Get started with your list today!

Connecting people

with similar interests!

Technologies

Bloombla is a free, easy-to-use yet powerful storytelling tool that helps you collect, manage and share your life experiences with others. Tell your stories, upload your pictures, and share it all with friends and family. Our unique structured platform gives us the ability to then connect your stories with people that share similar interests and experiences. Make Your mark.

Bloombla is a symfony project with a MySQL backend. Some of the biggest challenges in this project included the algorithms for merging similar "blooms" into the same record as well as well as making use of heavy caching of page elements due to the sheer number of database queries needed for some of the most important pages of the site. Template caching as well as database query caching was utilised.

AppMoni

AppMoni launched in September 2013 as the first ever product to monitor Facebook applications within a tab or canvas. Developers, project managers and clients are able to easily add their apps to be monitored by Moni who will alert them as and when issues occur.

AllFacebook - "Facebook developers and page administrators that want to keep tabs on their applications can now do so via Facebook app-monitoring tool..." - Read more here

AppMoni the Facebook apps

monitoring tool

Overview

AppMoni is built on top of the Symfony2 full stack framework and behind the scenes makes use of many technologies including MongoDB and Node.js. The website is responsive so can be used across multiple platforms and screen sizes. Scalability is one of the biggest challenges of this project as all the apps need to be constantly monitored asynchronously.

"Moni takes care of checking that your apps on Facebook are always up and running. Monitoring your apps is essential to the success of any project or social media campaign!"

It is an invaluable tool for any campaign pushing traffic to a Facebook app and a must for agencies to ensure they are the first to know when something is going wrong.

Reach7

Reach7

Social media translation.

Technologies

The creative idea and concept were envisioned and designed by the BOXLIGHT founders and key team members were put on development.

Technologies used, were Silex, MongoDB, ReactJS, Node.js.

Solid Delivery

E-mail Marketing: Solid Delivery is an in-house tool BOXLIGHT built and is now trusted by many leading agencies to deliver e-mail campaigns to subscriber lists of all sizes.

Solid Delivery email

marketing tool for bespoke sends.

Technologies

It is a managed service which offers a dedicated account manager to assist with the sending of bulk e-mail campaigns and provides customers with a web portal which keeps track of all vital statistics within a campaign such as opens, clicks, bounces and user devices.

The Solid Delivery web portal is a symfony project making heavy use of MySQL and the Amazon API's. All campaigns are hosted in the Amazon cloud using the EC2 and S3 services. We had to overcome immense scaling challenges with millions of users opening the same e-mail in a short period of time which needed to be tracked in real-time with hosted images loading instantly. We made heavy use of caching, load balancing and MySQL optimisations.

Solid Delivery has been responsible for sending campaigns to from a few thousand subscribers to millions of subscribers and has executed some challenging customised campaigns which are simply not possible with most self-service e-mail marketing platforms.

Always

innovate.

XTechnologies

Overview

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Silex

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Cloud Computing

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Puppet

Amazon Web Services

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Linux

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ReactJS

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Vue.js

MongoDB

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MySQL

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GIT

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Symfony3

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NodeJS

Facebook API

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Redux

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HTML5 & CSS3

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Ansible

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Terraform

BOXLIGHT – Technologies

We use the best technologies available for the app at hand. Our experienced team of in-house developers are constantly keeping on top of the latest technologies and love to research what's around the corner.

We stay on the cutting edge by not restricting our development to just one technology but by expanding our reach to ensure the client and the project receives a full in-depth technical spec that will lay out the architecture and reasons behind the technologies used.

Silex – Framework

"Silex is a PHP microframework for PHP 5.5 and above. It is built on the shoulders of Symfony3 and Pimple and also inspired by sinatra."

Our developers are huge fans of the symfony framework and BOXLIGHT has been heavily involved in the scene for the past few years. Organising events and talks for our prefered framework. This year we have developed many projects on Silex, a microframework, which makes sense for a lot of projects we work on.

Every project has its own uniqueness and set of requirements but if a lightweight flexible framework is needed Silex is definitely the one we would recommend. More info here

Cloud Computing – Backend

Cloud computing, virtualisation, elastic computing are all buzz words playing a revolutionary role in how solutions are being hosted. We have helped many of our clients reduce their hosting costs by up to 70% whilst improving the reliability, dependability and flexibility of their solution.

We work primarily with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud and Linode but are open to all platforms providing Linux server hosting.

Puppet – Devops

Puppet allows us to deploy complex and modular infrastructures for projects of any size. We have years of experience in enterprise grade puppet deployments.

Amazon Web Services – AWS

Leading the way in cloud computing with clouds in the US, Europe and Asia - Amazon Web Services are providing companies a means of getting their projects off the ground with a low overhead and the comfort of knowing they have the worlds largest cloud behind them if things expand rapidly.

Amazon offer so many services it is often difficult to digest them all - but luckily we have taken the time to gain experience with them all.

Linux – Server

We are primarily a linux powered agency. Our developers use Linux all day, every day. Our favourite distros are Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, CentOS and Amazon Linux but we have rolled out solutions on most of the big names.

Our experience covers a myriad of technologies such as memcache, nginx, apache, mysql, mongodb, php-fpm and we will help ensure your linux solution is secure and making the best use of the technologies available to us today.

ReactJS – Javascript

ReactJS allows us to write modular javascript components making front-end development extremely scalable and easier to hand over to other teams as developers can safely identify where all components are used within a codebase, and simply write their own moving forward.

Vue.js – Javascript

Vue.js is a minimal Javascript framework which allows us to rapidly introduce javascript functionality to smaller applications. It is extremely lightweight but supports all the features of the major Javascript frameworks in use to day making it an ideal candidate for small to medium size projects although it is often used with larger projects as well.

MySQL – Database

Still the most popular database application on the web, our developers are well versed in structuring relational databases to be scalable, secure and normalised. Due to the widespread adoption of MySQL, it is a popular choice for client applications which need to be distributed to global teams.

Our developers have worked on applications which hold data in excess of 1TB with millions of rows which need archiving and processing via Big Data solutions such as Hadoop. Rest assured your competition entries are safe with us.

MongoDB – Database

We can't get enough of MongoDB. Every new page of documentation we encounter opens new possibilities of what can be achieved by database storage solutions alone. We have developed a number of real world applications using MongoDB and are always looking for new opportunities to make use of the technology for client projects.

NoSQL is certainly a game changer, and we will continue to help pioneer the uptake of this exciting technology.

GIT – Version Control

Not a line of code is missed at our headquarters as we are heavy users of Git. Most work is done in our private Git repositories and we are constantly reviewing each other's code via pull requests into our primary development streams. Whenever possible we contribute to Github and open source plugins and tools which we have developed in house.

Symfony3 – Framework

We have a long history with symfony and continue to use the framework on a daily basis. Many of our larger builds are built using the full-stack Symfony3 framework. Not only have we hosted talks and events around symfony, we have contributed patches and bug fixes to the framework as well.

NodeJS – Language

NodeJS brings Javascript to the server. We have embreaced this change and have used NodeJS extensively in recent years.

Facebook – API

Considered specialists in the field, at BOXLIGHT we have developed 100's of Facebook applications and explored practically every corner of the API. Once known as treacherous territory, our in house development kits and helpers have managed to tame the API and allowed us to bring applications to market faster than all of our competitors. We continue to build apps and products around the API and contribute to the Facebook developer community on a regular basis.

We know the API inside out and provide consultancy in addition to our application development services.

Redux – Javascript

Redux is the complimentary data store for the ReactJS project and our pattern of choice for developing complex Javascript applications. It provides a reliable and predictable state to applications.

HTML5 & CSS3 – HTML

HTML5 & CSS3 is the new standard for the web and mobile apps. Using these technologies opens up a variety of functionality most modern browsers now support. Flash animation is mostly no longer an option for mobile support and this has given HTML5 Canvas animation a really big push.

We've developed some great games and animated applications using HTML5 animations that work across any device. BOXLIGHT also contributes to the community by sponsoring the social twitter account @HTML5ANDCSS3 to promote new techniques to all 8000 followers and counting!

Ansible – Devops

Ansible is fast becoming the most popular tool for infrastructure automation due to it's short learning curve and predictable execution order compared to other tools such as Puppet. Having deployed architectures with both, Ansible is fast becoming the favourite tool our devops toolbox.

Terraform – Devops

Terraform provides a simple yet powerful configuration to provide infrastructure as code and allow us to describe, test and finally deploy cloud configurations which are scalable and secure.

Each APP is different, our developers use only the latest and best technologies available.

SILEXTwig

XClients

let our clients do the talking.

Huey Nhan, Digital consultant at ECPAT International

I've commissioned Boxlight to develop projects at both Digital Outlook and Wieden+Kennedy. They're skillfull, flexible, responsive and always a pleasure to work with. They develop on the Symfony framework with great speed and confidence and I wouldn't hesitate recommending them to anyone.

Dino Burbidge, IP Development Director at Mind Candy

While in my role as Creative Director at Digital Outlook, we had internal Facebook resource. We eventually turned to Boxlight to take over all social and Facebook development. Great, safe pair of hands. Always willing and always smiling. Would definitely recommend.